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Dr. Andy Galpin on Huberman Lab: Why soreness misleads you

Through progressive overload, not damage: hypertrophy demands volume near failure; strength demands high intensity and longer rest between heavy sets.

Dr. Andrew Hubermanhost
Apr 2, 202634mWatch on YouTube ↗

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  1. 0:00 – 0:39

    Andy Galpin

    1. AH

      Welcome to Huberman Lab Essentials, where we revisit past episodes for the most potent and actionable science-based tools for mental health, physical health, and performance. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. And now for my discussion with Dr. Andy Galpin. Welcome, Dr. Professor Andy Galpin. There are only a handful, meaning about three or four people who I trust enough in the exercise physiology space that when they speak, I not only listen, but I modify my protocols. And you are among those three or four people.

  2. 0:39 – 3:53

    9 Exercise Adaptations; Progressive Overload

    1. AH

      I would love to have you share with us what you think most everybody or even everybody should know about principles of strength training and principles of, let's call it hypertrophy, power, and the other ca- sort of categories of training.

    2. AG

      There's about nine different adaptations you can get from exercise. First one to think about is what we'll just call skill. So this is improving anything from, say, a golf swing to a squatting technique to running. And this is just simply moving mechanically how you want your body to move. From there, we're gonna get into speed. So this is moving as fast as possible. The next one is power. And power is a function of speed, but it's also a function of the next one, which is strength. So if you actually multiply strength by speed, you get power. So there's carryover, so like a lot of things that you would do for the development of strength and power, um, they are somewhat similar, but then there's differences. Once you get past strength, then the next one kinda down the list is hypertrophy. This is muscle size, right? Growing muscle mass is one way to think about it. After hypertrophy, you get into these categories of, the next one is, um, these are all globally endurance-based issues, and the very first one is called muscular endurance. So this is your ability to do how many push-ups can you do in one minute, you know, things like that. Past muscular endurance, you're now into more of an energetic or even cardiovascular fatigue. So you've left the local muscle, and you're now into the entire physiological system and its ability to produce and sustain work. Think about this as, um, I call this anaerobic power, right? So this is your ability to produce a lot of work for, say, thirty seconds to maybe one minute, kinda two minutes like that. The next one down, then, is more closely aligned to what we'll call your VO2 max. So this is your ability to kinda do the same thing, but more of a time domain of, say, three to twelve minutes. So this is gonna be a maximum heart rate, but it's gonna be well past just max heart rate. Then after that, we have what I call long-duration endurance. So this is your ability to sustain work. The time domain doesn't matter in terms of how fast go-- you're going. It's how c- how long can you sustain work? This is thirty-plus minutes of no break like that. So as just an high-level overview, those are the, the different things you can target. And again, some of those cross over, and some are actually a little bit contrarian to the other ones. So pushing towards one is maybe gonna sacrifice something else. There's a handful of things you have got to do to make all of those things work. One of them is functionally called progressive overload. If you want to continue to improve, you have to have some method of overload. Adaptation physiologically happens as a byproduct of stress, so you have to push a system. So if you continue to do, say, the exact same workout over time, you better not expect much improvement. You can keep maintenance, but you're not going to be adding additional stress. In general, you have to have some sort of progressive overload. This could come from adding more weights. This could come from adding more repetitions. It could come from doing it more often in the week. It could come from adding complexity to the movement. So there's a lot of different ways to progress, but you have to have some sort of movement forward. So if you have this kind of routine where you've built Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday or something, and you just do that infinitely, um, you're not going to get very far.

  3. 3:53 – 8:39

    Progressive Overload, One-Rep Max, Soreness, Tool: Modifiable Variables

    1. AH

      So what are the progressive overload principles, um, that are most effective over time for strength and hypertrophy?

    2. AG

      You have what we call your modifiable variables. So this is a very short list of all the things you can modify, the different variables within your workout that can be modified that will change the outcome. A fancy way of saying, "If you do this differently, then you're gonna get a different result." Um, so modifiable variables. Um, the very first one of those is called choice. So this is the exercise choice that you select. So if you choose, "I wanna get stronger, I'm gonna do a bench press," well, if you do the wrong set range, the wrong repetition range, the wrong speed, you won't get strength. You maybe get muscular endurance and very little strength adaptation. So the exercise selection itself is important, but it does not determine the outcome adaptation, right? It is the application of the exercise. What are the sets? What are the reps? What are the, uh, rest ranges that you're using? That's gonna be your primary determinant. The second one is the intensity, and that refers to, in this context, not perceived effort, like, "Wow, that was a really intense workout." It is quite literally either a percentage of your one rep at max or a percentage of your maximum heart rate or VO2 max. So for the strength-based things, you wanna think about what's the percentage of the maximum weight I could lift one time, and that's, that's what we're gonna call one rep max. Or it's a percentage of my heart rate, right? So if I tell you to get on a bike, and I want you to do intervals, and I want you at seventy-five percent, I'm typically referring to seventy-five percent of your max heart rate or VO2 max or, you know, something like that. If I tell you to do squats at seventy-five percent, that means seventy-five percent of the maximum amount of weight you could lift one time or close. The third one is what we call volume, and so this is just how many reps and how many sets are you doing, right? So if you're gonna do three sets of ten, that volume would be thirty, right? Five sets of five, that volume is twenty-five. It's just a simple equation. How much work are you totally doing? Uh, the next one past that is called rest intervals. So this is the amount of time you're taking in between typically a set. Um, then from there, you have progression, which is what we started to talk about, this progressive overload. Are you increasing by weight or reps or rest intervals or complexity? All of those things can be changed as a method of progression. And so maybe you wanna go, um, progressing from a single joint exercise like a, a leg extension on a machineAnd you want to progress by moving to a whole body movement like a squat. That in and of itself, you don't have to change the load or the reps or the rest. That is a representation of progressive overload. And it's probably a pretty good place to start because number one, especially for beginners, you want to make sure that the movement pattern is correct. Don't worry about intensity. Don't worry about rep ranges or any of these things. You need to learn to move correctly, and you need to give your body some time to develop some tissue tolerance so that you're not getting overtly sore. In general, soreness is a terrible proxy for exercise quality. It's a really bad way to estimate whether it was a good or a bad workout, especially for people in that beginner to middle to moderate. In fact, even for our professional athletes, um, we do not use soreness as a metric of a good workout. On the same token, because stress is required for adaptation, you don't want to leave the gym and feel like, "I don't really do much." Like, [chuckles] if you're sore of like, you're moving around a little bit and you're like, "Man, this is a little bit sore," you can train. If you're like, "I can't sit on the couch without crying because my glutes are so sore," in that particular case, I'd say you've actually gone to the place of detriment because now you're gonna have to skip a training session, and now you're behind. So your actual total volume, say across the month, is actually gonna be lower because you went way too hard in those workouts, had to take too many days off in between. You're gonna see that you're gonna cover less distance over the course of a month or six month or even a year. So you wanna walk a pretty fine line. And for most people, I would say hedge a little bit on the side of less sore than more sore because frequency is very, very important for almost all these adaptations.

    3. AH

      Training frequency.

    4. AG

      Which is the last modifiable variable, right? Frequency, which is how many times per week are you, are you doing that thing? So those are kind of our, our global things that we can play with. So when I'm trying to manipulate and get strength versus hypertrophy, or you know what? I want like a little bit of both. All those variables are the things that are going through my mind. Which one do I need to move in which direction so that I can get this outcome and not this outcome over here? For example, some folks might wanna get stronger, but not put muscle mass on. Some folks are just kind of want both, and that's a lot of the general public. I wanna get a little stronger and a little bit more muscle. Great. But there are instances where people, for performance reasons or for purely personal preference, like, "I don't wanna get any more muscle." Great. "But I wanna get stronger." Awesome. If you manipulate those variables correctly, you can get exactly that. Very little development of muscle size and a lot of development in strength. And this is why we continue to break world records in sports like power lifting and weightlifting that have weight classes. So there's a top number that we can hit in terms of body size, but yet we continue to get stronger and faster. So this is very possible if you understand how to manipulate all those variables.

  4. 8:39 – 11:11

    Full-Body Workout, Exercise Selection

    1. AH

      How should we modify the variables?

    2. AG

      Love it. All right, great. So one of my other laws of strength and conditioning is, in general, the default is all joints through all range of motion. So this is important because it's gonna answer your very first question on this strength category. In general, the ankle should go through the full range of motion in the ankle. The knee should go through the full range of motion in the knee, the hip, the elbow, et cetera, et cetera, right? So a-across, I would even say it doesn't even have to be the day, but maybe throughout the week, try to get every joint through full range of motion. When I say full range of motion, that's the default. That doesn't mean every single person can do that for every single exercise. It means that's where we should be striving to, and that's our starting point. You're gonna see a lot less injury and a lot more productivity out of your training sessions. In fact, the science is fairly clear on this one. M- strength development as well as hypertrophy is generally enhanced with a larger range of motion of training. So if you n- if you're doing a, say, a deadlift, and in order to take your knee through a full range of motion on a deadlift, you have to compromise your back position, that's no bueno. So caveats there aside, don't kill me. Like, in good positions always.

    3. AH

      And don't kill yourselves-

    4. AG

      Yes.

    5. AH

      -more importantly. [chuckles]

    6. AG

      So why that matters is if we walk through strength, the very first thing I'm gonna go through is the, the exercise selection. So let's choose an exercise which ideally has a full range of motion or close to it that doesn't induce injury for you, that you can still maintain good neck and s- low back and, and position and everything else, um, you feel comfortable with, so you can feel strong, but you don't feel like, oh my gosh. If you've never snatched before, having you do a snatch for a maximum, even, you know, seventy-five percent, like it's a terrible idea. You're not gonna feel confident. It's gonna be a train wreck. I would rather put you on a machine bench press so you can go, "I feel stable, I feel safe here, and I can just express my strength." So exercise choice in general, full range of motion, and you wanna kinda balance between the movement areas. So this is an upper body press, so this is pushing away from you, bench press, things like that. Upper body pull, pulling an implement towards you, uh, bent row, pull-up. Um, the pressing should be horizontal, so perpendicular to your body, as well as vertical. So this is lifting a weight over top of your head, lifting a weight away from you. The pull version is pulling horizontally to you and pulling vertically down, pull up, things like that. So if you were going to do a single workout, you could choose four exercises, and you could choose one of each. One press, upper body press, one upper body pull, one lower body hinge, one lower body press. And then that would be like a decently well-rounded exercise. Um, that's your exercise selection. And if you're taking those through a full range of motion, you're at a pretty good spot, as close as you

  5. 11:11 – 14:51

    Training Intensity, Repetitions, Sets, Rest Intervals, Supersets

    1. AG

      can. The next one is intensity. So if you wanna develop strength, there is a certain recruitment threshold needed for neurons to fire. And we have muscle fibers in what we call fast-twitch muscle fibers and slow-twitch muscle fibers. And in general, you're going to activate the slow-twitch ones first because they tend to be associated with low-threshold motor neurons. It's not exactly that way, but it's, it's close enough, right? Well, the only way that you activate some of these higher-threshold neurons is to demand the muscle to produce more force. So in general, the only way to use these big chunks of your muscle, which are incredibly important for aging, by the way, one of the major problems we have with aging developing or development of aging-related issues with muscle is the fact that we lose fast-twitch fibers preferentially. And then we have major problems as we go down the line because we've lost a big chunk of our strength and size. So you wanna make sure these fibers stay alive and intact. So with that being said, the only way to develop strength is then to challenge the muscle to produce more total force. So if you want to get stronger, you need to impose a demand of strength.Not repetitions. So this has to be, the load has to be very high. Um, in general, you're probably looking at above eighty-five percent of your one-rep max. If you're moderately trained, maybe seventy-five percent. So because the intensity demand is so high, that is going to force you to do a low repetition range. You can't do twelve reps at ninety-five percent. That-- then it wouldn't be ninety-five percent of your one-rep max. So by definition, true strength training is really going to be in like five repetitions per set or less range. So we've covered choice, intensity, and, um, repetitions, right? The total amount of sets that you do is, is really kinda up to your personal fitness level, right? Um, if you did as little as like three sets per exercise, that's probably enough.

    2. AH

      Work sets.

    3. AG

      Totally. Yeah, totally work sets, right. So get fully warmed up and build up to that eighty-five percent. Don't just walk into the gym and throw eighty-five percent on and go, "Thank you." That's a, that's a important distinction. A very classic warm-up thing would be like a set of ten at fifty percent, a set of eight at sixty percent, a set of maybe eight again at seventy percent, and then maybe like a set of five at seventy-five percent. So two or three or four sets kind of building intensity and lowering the rep range, and then you would go after your two or three working sets. Also, in terms of rest intervals, the primary driver of strength is intensity. It's, it's not the volume, right? It's the intensity. So in order to maintain that, we have to do a low repetition range, but in addition, we also have to have a high rest interval, because if we have any amount of fatigue incur, and we have to then either reduce the reps or reduce the intensity, we've lost the primary driver. We've lost that main signal. So the number we're gonna throw out typically is like two to four minutes. Um, so imagine you did, you know, your set of bench press, and you did five repetitions at eighty-five percent, you probably wanna rest two to four minutes before coming back to the bench. That doesn't mean you have to sit there on your phone. Like, in fact, please don't. [chuckles] Like, everyone will thank you for not doing that, I promise. You can engage other muscle groups. This is what we call supersetting. So you're doing your bench press, and while that two-minute clock is running for your chest to rest, you can go over and do your deadlifts. You can kinda move back and forth, and this is how you can make strength training a not seven-hour workout. If you're a professional athlete, you're gonna take that time because you wanna maximize the outcome. Um, sup-- we've done this actually in our lab too. Supersets will reduce the strength gains, but by a tiny amount.

    4. AH

      Mm.

    5. AG

      And most of us don't care enough relative to it's going to triple the length of your training session. It's not worth it. So for the average person, I will tell them, yeah, superset. For someone who's trying to break a world record in weightlifting or powerlifting, uh, don't superset.

  6. 14:51 – 17:06

    Hypertrophy vs Strength Training Recovery

    1. AH

      How often can, can and should one train a muscle, and how do you know if a m- muscle is recovered locally, and how do you know if your nervous system is recovered systemically?

    2. AG

      One of the question is, what are you training for? If you're training for hypertrophy, right, muscle size, muscle growth, we need to hedge towards recovery, because what you're trying to do is cause a massive insult there, allow then protein synthesis to occur, building of new tissue, which takes time, forty-eight to seventy-two hours, like kind of at a minimum, that process needs to occur. If you're doing actually more strength, strength is not gonna cause a lot of soreness. Therefore, intensity is the driver, therefore frequency can be as high as you want. So you can train every single day the same exact muscle if speed or power or strength are the primary training tools. But if you want to allow for that process of connect, uh, contractile proteins to, to add and grow, then you're gonna have to allow some recovery, because if you go back into that muscle too soon, you're gonna blunt the response, you're gonna stop it, you're gonna cut it off. You have all kinds of, of problems going on in the cell that are gonna, um, just attenuate that, that growth response. So the answer for hypertrophy is probably less than three out of ten on level of soreness, you can go again. In general, you're probably looking at seventy-two hours is th-the optimal window. So if you trained your, your shoulders on Monday, you probably wouldn't want to train them again on Tuesday. If hypertrophy is the goal, maybe Wednesday, maybe Thursday is best. So something like an every two to three day window is, is probably, um... And we know a little bit more now about why that is. Um, the gene cascade, the signaling response happens-- Well, the signaling happens instantaneously, right? Within seconds. The gene cascade is probably in the, peaked in the four-hour window, like de-depending on which gene you wanna look at, but it's just kind of a snapshot. But the protein synthesis process is twenty-four to forty-eight hour thing, and so it tends to kinda look like let that thing finish and let that signal go back to baseline, and then hit it again, and then hit it again. And now as long as you're providing the nutrients, the recovery should happen, and you should be able to sustain the same work output in the training session, so the stimulus stays high, and the recovery's there, and you can now continue to grow muscle.

  7. 17:06 – 18:59

    Training Volume & Frequency for Hypertrophy

    1. AH

      What if the, the training split, uh, lifestyle factors, et cetera, somebody, say, let's use your example, trains, uh, shoulders on Monday, um, ideally, they would train them again on Thursday-

    2. AG

      Yep

    3. AH

      ...in their particular instance, somewhere Wednesday or Thursday, but they don't. They wait until Saturday or Sunday for whatever reason. Maybe it's more compatible with their work, work and other exercise schedule. Are they actually losing hypertrophy that they gained, or they've missed a, a, a window to induce further hypertrophy?

    4. AG

      It's probably better to think about it as the latter. It's not that you're-- you've lost, it's just you've just kind of lost an opportunity to, to make more progress. If you wanna take five days or six days in between each muscle group, you can do that. In fact, if you look at the research, it's gonna show that frequency, it, it can handle changes as long as you get to the same total volume. So you can do that, you just have to do a lot more work in that one workout. The challenge with splitting up your training sessions for hypertrophy into smaller numbers, like once or twice a week, it's just difficult to get that number. It's difficult to get that volume done. Volume-wise, the more recent meta-analyses are gonna say that you're probably looking at around ten working sets per muscle group per week.Seems to be kind of the minimum threshold that you're going to want to hit. So if you did three sets of 10 at your shoulders on Monday, three sets of 10 shoulders Wednesday, and three on Friday, that's nine working sets. The problem is 10 is kind of the minimum. You probably want to look for more like 15 to 20, and in fact, well-trained folks, 20, 25. That becomes very challenging in one workout. In fact, defuncto, you're not going to be able to do it, right? And so that is where it's not the frequency that looks like it kills you. It's just the fact you have got to get, because the total driver of strength is intensity, but the total driver of hypertrophy is volume, assumed you're taking it to fatigue, right, or muscular failure. So it's just tough to get enough done.

  8. 18:59 – 22:31

    Hypertrophy Rep Ranges, Frequency & Recovery; Cell Mechanisms

    1. AH

      For hypertrophy-

    2. AG

      Sure

    3. AH

      ... what are the repetition ranges that are effective, and what are the ones that are most effective if one is trying to maximize some of the other variables? Like people don't want to spend more than-

    4. AG

      Yeah

    5. AH

      ... an hour to 75 minutes-

    6. AG

      Realistically

    7. AH

      ... in the gym.

    8. AG

      The quick answer there is anywhere between like five to 30 reps per set. That's gonna show across the literature pretty much equal hypertrophy gains. Um, but I'm just remembering one thing from a second ago. I want to give a better answer for the frequency. You can do every single day for strength. If you want, though, like what's probably minimally viable, two, twice per week per muscle. So hamstrings, strength twice per week. That, that's a good number to get most people really strong.

    9. AH

      Okay.

    10. AG

      You can do every single day. You don't need to, though. So I, I want to make sure that like I wasn't saying you have to train a muscle 85% every single day to get it strong. Two is a good number. Three is great, but probably even two is really effective. When it comes to hypertrophy training, the way I like to explain it is it's kind of idiot-proof. The programming is idiot-proof. The work is hard, though. So here's your range. Anywhere between f- you know, five reps and 30. Like can you hit somewhere in there? Perfect. It's all equally effective. You can't screw that up. The only caveat for hypertrophy is you have to take it to muscular failure.

    11. AH

      And you need enough rest for the adaptation and protein synthesis to occur?

    12. AG

      Yep.

    13. AH

      Yeah.

    14. AG

      Right? And if you recover faster, you can maybe do it more frequently. And if you don't, maybe less frequently.

    15. AH

      Should people perhaps experiment and figure out what repetition range allows them to recover, um, in concert with the training frequency that they can do consistently?

    16. AG

      My recommendation is I think you should actually use the repetition range as a way to have some variation because most people don't want to go in the gym and do three sets of 10. They're gonna get very bored very quickly. And so I, I think you should actually intentionally change the rep schemes for simple sake of having more fun. It is a very different challenge. The mechanisms that are inducing hypertrophy are different, but there's only a maximum amount of growth that one can get, right? But the three most likely drivers are, one, metabolic stress, two, mechanical tension, and then three, muscular damage. You don't have to have all three. One is sufficient. You can have a little bit of one or two, and you can kind of-- So you get to play here. We've already talked about the muscular damage. Again, it's very clear more damage is not better, but it is somewhat a decent proxy, right? Like again, a little bit of soreness is good. Just don't get so sore it's compromising your total volume. All right? Uh, mechanical tension is kind of like strength, and this is why if you do even sets of five or eight and you're kind of close to that strength range, you will gain a little bit of muscle. It's not optimal muscle gain, but you're gonna gain some because everything in these-- like physiology didn't cut off at four reps and then five reps is a different thing, right? It's, it's always a blend. So think of it as like a, a fading curve. As you get closer to the end, it fades less effective. As you get closer to the middle, it's more effective. Anywhere between eight reps per set to 30, it's equally effective. Past 30, it's gonna blend out. Past eight to five to four to three, it's gonna blend, you know, lesser there. So mechanical tension is the one that's heavy. Muscle damage is the other one. The third one is metabolic stress, and this is, um, a- again, a bit of an area of scientific contention, but something's there. I know something's there. We just, we're just kind of fumbling to figure out what exactly it is, and this is-- metabolic stress is the burn, right? It, it's there. So you want to train to failure, but you don't need to go to extreme failure. So you don't need to necessarily go to that, like, a partner has to lift the barbell off my chest, but you have to get close.

  9. 22:31 – 24:08

    Tool: 3 x 5 Protocol; Power vs Strength

    1. AH

      If you'd be willing to throw out a few sort of sets and rep parameters that could, uh, act as broad guidelines-

    2. AG

      Yeah

    3. AH

      ... for people who want to, uh, explore further.

    4. AG

      A really fast answer is what I just call the three to five concept, right? So pick three to five exercises. If you're feeling better that day, choose on the higher end. If you're feeling less that day or you have a shorter time frame to train, go less. So three to five exercises. Do three to five reps, three to five sets, take three to five minutes rest in between, and do it three to five times a week. So that can be as little as three sets of three for three exercises three times a week. That's, that's a 20-minute workout three times a week. It can be as high as five sets of five for five exercises five days a week. So it's very broad and allows people to still stay within the domains of strength and power while still being able to move and contour toward their lifestyle and, and soreness and time and all those things. The only differentiator to pay attention to between power and strength is intensity. So if you want strength, this is now 85%-plus of your max, right? If you want power, it needs to be a lot lighter 'cause you need to move more towards the velocity end of the spectrum because power is strength multiplied by speed. So while getting stronger by definition can help power, you probably want to spend more of your time in the 40% to 70% range, like plus or minus. So that's it. Both of them conceptually they'll work everything else. The exercise, the reps, the, the frequency, all that can be still in the three to five range. Just change the intensity depending on which outcome you want.

  10. 24:08 – 27:10

    Mental Awareness in Training; Mind-Muscle Connection

    1. AH

      The nervous system obviously plays an important role at the level of nerves controlling the contraction of muscle fibers. But of course, we have these upper motor neurons, which are the ones that reside in our brain that control the lower motor neurons that control muscle.

    2. AG

      Yeah.

    3. AH

      This takes us into the realm of where the mind is at during a particular movement. I can imagine doing workouts that are mainly focused on strengthOr mainly focused on hypertrophy. And in the case of strength, am I trying to move weights? And when I'm trying to generate hypertrophy, am I trying to quote unquote "challenge muscles"? That subtle mental shift changes the patterns of nerve fiber recruitment. So can we say to get stronger, focus on moving weights, still with proper form and safely, and to get hypertrophy, focus on challenging muscles, still with proper form and safely?

    4. AG

      Intentionality matters for both. In other words, if you look at some interesting science that's been done on power development and speed development, the intent to move is actually more important than the actual movement velocity. So if, if you're doing, say, something for power or strength, and you're doing just enough to get the bar up, that will result in less improvements in strength than even if you're moving at the exact same speed, but you're intending to move faster. And this is one of the reasons why good coaching matters. So if you're coaching an athlete through a power workout especially, and they're doing enough to just lift fifty percent of their one-rep max, it's not going to generate as much speed development as them trying to move that bar as fast as they can, even if the net result is the same bar bell velocity. Turns out nerves matter.

    5. AH

      Even if the bar is moving at the same speed, same weight-

    6. AG

      Yeah

    7. AH

      ... if my internal representation, my thoughts are, I'm trying to move this as fast as possible-

    8. AG

      Yeah

    9. AH

      ... versus I'm just trying to get the bar away from me and, and get the weight up, I'm going to get different outcomes.

    10. AG

      Yep, this is quality of work, right? This is, did you do enough to just check off the box or did you actually strive for adaptation, right? Si- similar concept actually works for hypertrophy in terms of there is a handful of very recent studies that have looked at what we'll call the mind-muscle connection, and this is doing things like imagine a bicep curl, and you're simply looking at and watching your biceps, and you're thinking about contracting it harder. Even though you execute the same repetitions at the same exact intensity, initial indications are the mind-body connection are going to result in more growth than not. I think it's very much worth your time to do a higher quality training session, be more intentional, be present than just executing the same exact workout. I think that's globally very clear to be to your advantage. So if you're thinking, "Look, I'm gonna-- Like, I don't wanna work out today. I got all this going on," or I'm tired or whatever, "I'm just gonna do the workout anyways and get through it," okay. If you can go, "You know what, though? Like, I'm gonna cut fifteen minutes out of this thing. I'm gonna get my head right. I'm gonna go get two twenty minutes of quality work done," that's, that's your best option by far.

  11. 27:10 – 29:26

    Activating Muscle Groups, Awareness, Tool: Eccentric Overload

    1. AH

      Are there ways that people can learn to engage particular muscle groups more effectively over time for sake of hypertrophy or strength or for ca- cases of trying to overcome injury potential or injury? Because imbalances-

    2. AG

      Totally

    3. AH

      ... are bad a- across the board.

    4. AG

      Yeah, this is actually very common, and I think everyone has probably gone through this. There's some part that you just can't get going, which goes back to earlier part of our conversation, which is why exercises themselves do not determine the adaptation. It's the execution that matters, right? It's the technique, it's the rep range. All of those are gonna determine your actual result. So if any time you were-- you're, you're banging your head against the wall and thinking like, "Why am I not getting movement here?" Growth or strength or whatever, it's guaranteed to be one of those areas, right? You're probably not getting, um, the muscle groups to activate. Whenever I'm diagnosing movement quality, I look for a handful of things, but very first one is awareness. You'd be surprised how many folks, um, when you just simply tell them that muscle group right there, and maybe you give them a, a tactical prompt, so you touch it, and you just tell them things like, "Hey, squeeze my finger. Squeeze my finger." As you're doing your bent row or your pull down, you can touch the lat. All this stuff can help get people, uh, to activate. Outside of simple awareness, eccentric overload is a very effective way for, uh, activation of a difficult to target muscle. Things like a pull-up. Okay, so if, if, if I'm going to do a pull-up and I have poor lat activation, to make the movement simpler, I'm gonna go all the way to the top. So imagine stepping on a box or something, going all the way to that top of that pull-up position. And starting from there, and I want you to simply lower it under control. And so you're just simply breaking the movement down into smaller pieces that allow you to f- to focus on the execution more. Eccentrics are great for strength development, very good for hypertrophy, and allow you to focus on control. I, I, I'm willing to bet a huge percentage of you out there who've like, "I've never had a sore lat, even though I've done a lot of pull-ups and things like that," if you do that eccentric only, you'll probably wake up the next day going, "Oh gosh, I feel it there." And that's a sign, even if you didn't feel it during the workout, but it got a little sore the next day, keep down that path. And eventually work that into a progression where you can do the concentric, eccentric, and isometric portions and get activation. So that, that may take you six weeks, it may take you six months, but that's generally a pretty good strategy for learning how to activate a muscle group.

    5. AH

      Is there

  12. 29:26 – 33:42

    Tool: Resistance Training Breathing & Post-Training

    1. AH

      a, a prescriptive for how to breathe during resistance training-

    2. AG

      Mm-hmm

    3. AH

      ... that applies seventy-five percent of the time-

    4. AG

      Yeah

    5. AH

      ... to seventy-five percent of the people?

    6. AG

      In general, a, a decent strategy is to maintain a breath hold during the lowering or eccentric or most dangerous part of the movement, and then you can exhale on the concentric portion. So if the bench press is our example, if you held in, braced, lowered it under control, and now started the concentric pushing away force, and then you wanted to take an expiration [exhales] during the last half of the concentric portion, that's, that's an okay strategy. If you're going to do a single rep, you don't need to worry about it. You, you can just avoid or omit breathing entirely. You're gonna be just fine. If you're doing more than that, especially three to four to five to seven, eight, you're gonna have to have some breathing strategy. A very common one is, um, probably every third breath, I'm gonna do like [inhales] [exhales] exhale on the third. Reset, re-breathe, something like that. If you feel like you need to breathe after every one, that's okay, but it's gonna get wasteful 'cause you have to take time in between reps of sitting there. If it's a squat, that's different.Um, versus a deadlift if you're resting at the bottom. So there, there is a little bit of game here. So in general, though, is, is that seventy-five, seventy-five kind of really thrown out-- you threw out. Breathe in through the lowering and exhale on the out if you have to. Less reps, don't worry about it. More reps, then you need to come up with some sort of breathing strategy.

    7. AH

      How about breathing in between sets, um, and maybe even after the workout?

    8. AG

      Yeah. We're not gonna just finish a workout, high five, drink water, and walk out of the gym. There will be a downregulation strategy that is heavily involved with some sort of light control as well as breath control. Um, the individual prescription on that, there's a ton of variation with what you can do. The easiest thing is do something that calms you down. Most likely, that's going to be move towards as much nasal breathing as you can possibly do. And a, a really easy rule of thumb is a double exhale length relative to inhale. So if you need to take a, like, four-second inhale, double that time and breathe out for eight seconds. A box breathing is fine, so equal inhale, equal hold, equal exhale, equal hold. So four-second inhale, four-second ex-- hold, et cetera, et cetera, and just breathe for five minutes.

    9. AH

      And I started doing this, and it completely changed the rate of recovery for me. I realized that I was leaving workouts, both endurance workouts and strength hypertrophy workouts, feeling great, but looking at my phone, getting right into email and meetings-

    10. AG

      Oh. Ooh, rough

    11. AH

      ... not concentrating on my breathing. And all I did was to introduce a, on your recommendation, a five-minute downregulation.

    12. AG

      Yeah.

    13. AH

      So exhale-emphasized breathing of a, a bunch of different varieties, physiological size, box breathing.

    14. AG

      Yeah.

    15. AH

      Exhale emphasized at twice as long as the inhale com-- um, component for five minutes.

    16. AG

      Yeah.

    17. AH

      And I noticed two things. One, I recovered more quickly workout to workout, no question about it.

    18. AG

      Yeah.

    19. AH

      And the other is that I used to have this, um, dip in energy that would occur three or four hours after a hard workout, and I always thought that had to do with the fact that I'd generally eaten a meal at some point post-workout.

    20. AG

      Hmm.

    21. AH

      Turns out it wasn't the meal at all.

    22. AG

      Yeah.

    23. AH

      It's that, that, that adrenaline, um, ramp up during the workouts. I wasn't clamping that at the end, and so I think eventually-

    24. AG

      It's leaking

    25. AH

      ... it just crashed. Turns out the downregulations allowed me to work through the afternoon.

    26. AG

      Yeah, if-

    27. AH

      It's really been quite powerful, and so I, I'm grateful to you for that, and I think this is something that I think ninety-eight percent of people are not doing, and it's only five minutes.

    28. AG

      You don't even have to do five. Give me three. If you really have to push it, give me three. You can do this in the shower if you have to. You need some sort of internal signal that we're safe. Throttle down here. We're gonna move on. That has to happen.

    29. AH

      Yeah, and you're saving energy. I mean, the energy here is neural energy. I think fighters do this. Good fighters learn to do this between rounds.

    30. AG

      Yeah.

  13. 33:42 – 34:25

    Acknowledgments

    1. AH

      uh, the listeners and I can well appreciate on the basis of today's discussion what a enormous wealth of information you are, how clear and, um, and potently you communicate that information, and also how you can, uh, take a huge cloud of information and still distill it into, um, protocols that ought to work for seventy-five percent of people seventy-five percent of the time, which is an immensely valuable, um, thing to do. So for me and from the listeners, I just wanna say thank you so much.

    2. AG

      My pleasure, man. I'm fi- I'm glad we finally got to connect.

    3. AH

      Professor Andy Galpin, thank you ever so much.

    4. AG

      My pleasure. [outro music]

Episode duration: 34:26

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